Produced by David Widger
Translated by Charles Cotton
Edited by William Carew Hazilitt
1877
XIII. Of Experience.
There is no desire more natural than that of knowledge. We try all waysthat can lead us to it; where reason is wanting, we therein employexperience,
"Per varios usus artem experientia fecit,
Exemplo monstrante viam,"
["By various trials experience created art, example shewing the
way."—Manilius, i. 59.]
which is a means much more weak and cheap; but truth is so great a thingthat we ought not to disdain any mediation that will guide us to it.Reason has so many forms that we know not to which to take; experiencehas no fewer; the consequence we would draw from the comparison of eventsis unsure, by reason they are always unlike. There is no quality souniversal in this image of things as diversity and variety. Both theGreeks and the Latins and we, for the most express example of similitude,employ that of eggs; and yet there have been men, particularly one atDelphos, who could distinguish marks of difference amongst eggs so wellthat he never mistook one for another, and having many hens, could tellwhich had laid it.
Dissimilitude intrudes itself of itself in our works; no art can arriveat perfect similitude: neither Perrozet nor any other can so carefullypolish and blanch the backs of his cards that some gamesters will notdistinguish them by seeing them only shuffled by another. Resemblancedoes not so much make one as difference makes another. Nature hasobliged herself to make nothing other that was not unlike.
And yet I am not much pleased with his opinion, who thought by themultitude of laws to curb the authority of judges in cutting out for themtheir several parcels; he was not aware that there is as much liberty andlatitude in the interpretation of laws as in their form; and they butfool themselves, who think to lessen and stop our disputes by recallingus to the express words of the Bible: forasmuch as our mind does not findthe field less spacious wherein to controvert the sense of another thanto deliver his own; and as if there were less animosity and tartness incommentary than in invention. We see how much he was mistaken, for wehave more laws in France than all the rest of the world put together, andmore than would be necessary for the government of all the worlds ofEpicurus:
"Ut olim flagitiis, sic nunc legibus, laboramus."
["As we were formerly by crimes, so we are now overburdened by laws."—Tacitus, Annal., iii. 25.]
and yet we have left so much to the opinions and decisions of our judgesthat there never was so full a liberty or so full a license. What haveour legislators gained by culling out a hundred thousand particularcases, and by applying to these a hundred thousand laws? This numberholds no manner of proportion with the infinite diversity of humanactions; the multiplication of our inventions will never arrive at thevariety of examples; add to these a hundred times as many more, it willstill not happen that, of events to come, there shall one be found that,in this vast number of millions of events so chosen and recorded, shallso tally with any other one, and be so exactly coupled and matched withit that there will not remain some circumstanc